All this week I’ve been talking about how and why you should create an "emailed delivered course", especially if you’re a solopreneur looking to climb into 6 figures with your first course (or if you want to add courses to your roster and climb towards 7 figures).
Why are email delivered courses especially for the people on my list (you) reading this right now?
Well, mainly because when you create a course and deliver it via email you have just trained a list of high-value customers to open every single email you send in eager anticipation.
This is how I’ve designed all my most popular courses and it’s the dream when it comes to owning a solopreneur business based around email marketing.
Now, yesterday I outlined an 8-step process for pre-selling and launching your first "email delivered course". And it raised a rather obvious question:
"What do I do if people don’t buy my "email delivered course" during the prelaunch? What if demand isn’t high enough?"—
It’s a good question and fairly advanced too. Most people just simply give up if things aren’t working exactly like they’ve dreamed of on the first go-around.
Let’s talk about "enough" and demand some more.
Everyone’s "enough" is going to be different.
If you have no email subscribers or audience, drumming up business and making those first sales is priority #1. In other words, one sale could be "enough" for you.
If you’re established (or have a client) and have already sold some courses or products, then there’s probably a unit number of courses you’re used to selling when you do a promotion.
It’s my experience that an "email delivered course", even during the first pre-launch like I outlined yesterday, should sell just as many units as a course that’s already been built.
If you normally sell 100 courses, your email delivered course should sell 100 units (maybe even more because "email delivered courses" will be novel the first time you launch).
Before I go on, I’ll let you know that I didn’t have an email list before I launched my first "email delivered course", CopyHour.
I posted in a forum to a group of friends, and 20 people paid me $20 to join. I then built the course in real time, staying just 1 hour ahead of my one Australian customer in the earliest time zone (I’ll save this full story for next week).
What would I have done if I posted there and no one wanted to buy?
What should you do if you try to launch and pre-sell an email delivered course and there’s not enough demand for you?
You have 2 good options:
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Refund people.
For some reason, this doesn’t cross people’s mind as an option.
Simply issue refunds to people and tell them that there wasn’t enough demand for the product. There is no shame in this. It’s the market and its wants/desires, not you.
People actually appreciate the honesty and straight-forwardness and you might even gain a new fan (I’m serious about this).
You’ve also now got a paying customer’s email address that you can sell to in the future.
There’s another "pro option" too:
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Build the course anyway.
If you follow along with what I said about picking the pain and dream outcome (aka topic) of your course, but then not a lot of people buy… just build the course anyway.
Huh? Why? That can’t be worth it, right?
Well, actually, there’s a very simple fix. For the next launch, you change your messaging. You change your topic and try a different way. Just now you’re fully armed with a course that you simply update (instead of writing a full new one).
What I’m trying to stress this week is something I say all the time: There are no rules. Only conversions.
- You can launch and pre-sell a course that you haven’t even started writing yet.
- You can take an existing course and change its name and focus.
- You can change the audience or market.
- You can send email blasts the day of with course content.
My friend works for a company that spent 5 months creating a course – completing all the content and getting it ready in a membership area.
They’re about to launch, but what if no one wants it? That’s been a giant waste of time.
What if instead you pre-sell an idea for a course – see if people want it – and then build alongside paying customers in real-time. And as a cherry on top, they LOVE you because the course actually works and now they’re addicted to your emails.
I can’t stress enough how amazing these "email delivered course" are for removing all the previous excuses and roadblocks you might have encountered with building courses – from the topic all the way to the actual course content creation.
Do you have any other questions about "email delivered courses" that I can answer?
Just hit reply. I’ll read everything and then answer the biggest questions for the group.
I also have a couple more things I’d like to add tomorrow – some secret sauce stuff.
Talk to you then!
– Derek